[OpenAFS] openafs fileservers in VMware ESX

[Matthew Cocker]

ted creedon wrote:
> Here I just move my raid card and 4 drives.
> 
> Linux 2.6 doesn't have support for the older IDE raid cards. New systems
> have soft raid which allows a drive only move. Its particularly easy with
> sata drives.
> 
> tedc

We have tried sata disks but they have very low mean times between 
failure and are rated for only ~35% spin time, not a profile that 
matches our requirements. They also perform very badly with non serial 
data reads and are terrible for write performance.

The SANs/ESX solution we have in place is for more than just afs, but 
within a VM we are getting read and write to disk performance on a par 
with our HPDL380 Smart5 raid systems when we compare disk performance 
with something like IOmeter. In fact the sans based esx VM outperforms 
local disk for reads.

As a CS department we are not the central IT provider to the university 
but we are one of the major inovation test beds witin the uni. We 
started testing virtualisation for the central provider late last year 
and while we were very doubtful at the time we have been proven wrong 
and have been very happy with the results. You need to very carefully 
look at the service cpu/memory/network/diskIO profiles to chose suitable 
  system to virtualise, but if the candiates are chose well it works 
very well and we have shown that it reduces costs.

In the end only time will tell if we have made a bad decision.

Cheers

Matt